The federal government spent $71.1 billion on personnel costs in fiscal year 2024-25, the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) has estimated, up from $69.6 billion the year before. Unfortunately, even though the number of public service jobs fell by about three per cent in 2025, the count of full-time equivalents, which accounts for whether those jobs were full-time or part-time, continued to grow, helping drive the cost increase. And despite the slight decline in the count of public servants in 2025, last year still capped off a decade of significant growth: from 257,034 in 2015, the federal public service expanded by more than 100,000, or over 39 per cent, to 357,965 by 2025.